Breast Cancer

 

Anticipatory Grief

Anne Boyer’s book about surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying, takes the reader inside what it feels like to endure chemotherapy without any promise of surviving. Boyer covers a wide range of topics—the physical suffering, fears about dying, figuring out how to cope with pain, research into the medical treatments, the philosophy and history of breast cancer procedures, and the social inequalities of a for-profit health care system. 

Triple-negative breast cancer has no cure, and no sure treatment. Her doctors gave her no assurance that she would survive, but chemotherapy offered her a chance, although it would extract a toll on the rest of her body. Boyer survived, but the chemo damaged the nerves that control her heart.

Among her many insights, she points out that while breast cancer treatments are often covered by insurance and your place of work, time to recover from the long-term effects of the therapy often are not, and women lose their jobs, their homes and too often the sense of who they are. She also points out that while many organizations receive funding for cancer, too few dollars are allocated to research to prevent cancer from starting. There are also passages of circular thoughts when Boyer is trying to think her way through something. These paragraphs show how chemo brains can get stuck in eddies of thoughts that circle around and around, trying to find a way out.

The eddy image is one that is known to those who grieve. Although you aren’t likely to die from grief, you also don’t know how you are going to get through the overwhelming trauma of losing someone who was an integral part of your life, and you don’t know how you are going to survive. 

As those who are grieving discover, Boyer experiences the sorrow of losing friends who simply didn’t want to deal with her illness, and her joy of discovering other friends who stepped up to support and keep her going. Most of the chapters are short, as if they were taken from a journal that Boyer kept over the months of her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Here are some quotes. If you substitute “grief” in the context of the sentences, you’ll find meaning:

17 “Sometimes to give a person a word to call their suffering is the only treatment for it.”

33 “After a cancer diagnosis, very little is ever itself again.”

75 “We are supposed to keep our unhappiness to ourselves but donate our courage to everyone.”

79 “But if you begin to accept your illness, or even to love it, you worry that you might want to keep it around … [because] it provides such clear instructions for existing….”

99 “Being sick makes excessive space for thinking, and excessive thinking makes room for thoughts of death.”

139 “…it is difficult to take care of the illness and to take care of yourself as well.”

142 “Some of us who survive the worst survive it into bare inexistence.”

213 “Pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it.”

262 After you survive breast cancer, you can feel “like a city that is most interesting for its ruins.”

268 ‘People are made out of language.’

287 “…when I was at my lowest, what I needed most was art—not comfort…”